My friend Steve Barron directed this new adaptation of Treasure Island for Sky 1 HD which I believe is being shown in the UK on New Year’s Day.

Looks like a LOT of fun and check out that cast.

Donald Sutherland!

Not a bad flight.

Full on nightmare though for one poor soul who turned an unhealthy shade of white and vomited for much of the flight when he wasn’t shivering under a blanket or crying in misery. I did think at one point we’d have to land and get him to a doctor, but the cabin crew were very persistent with tea. That eventually did the trick.

Nice to land and see posters for CONTAGION everywhere…

Just finding my feet and avoiding the lag by hanging out with Amy Berg who is stupidly putting me up this trip. As you’d expect her place is filled with writing spots so it should be a productive trip as long as I don’t fall asl…

This is my friend, Dave.

You’ll remember he did the artwork on the titles for PRECISION, but we’re also working together on a number of things that aren’t quite ready for public consumption yet. Buy me a drink and I’ll show you what a talented git he is.

If you follow Dave on Twitter and/or Instagram you’ll have seen these wonderful tiny sketches featuring a shiny new ten pence piece and one added detail. Here’s one featuring the greatest space craft ever made:

Just in case you missed them here they are so far:

“That’s no moon…”

“Where we’re going, we don’t need eyes to see…”

Massive nuclear explosion… Moon torn out of Earth’s orbit…

“A shining planet… Known as ‘Earth’”

“See you later, Navigator!”

“My God… It’s full of stars…”

“We’re in the pipe, five by five…”

“You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier”

“He’s no use to me dead…”

“To boldly go…”

I’m thinking about having the full set framed.

You may remember James from The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs, his twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War from December 2004 to November 2009. Or as the chap who archived his first two years of twittering to a hardback book entitled My Life in Tweets. Maybe from one his many speaking engagements and/or consistently enjoyable ever growing number of projects…

His latest is Where the F**k Was I?, a beautiful looking book of 202 maps based on his iPhone tracked movements over the past year. In his explanation of the book he writes something so sweet that I started thinking about my phone with the same sad pang that I get when I think about the little dead Mars Rover, Spirit:

(Other aspects of the device’s place-making I enjoy: I love its hunger for new places, the inquisitive sensor blooming in new areas of the city, the way it stripes the streets of Sydney and Udaipur; new to me, new to the machine. It is opening its eyes and looking around, walking the streets beside me with the same surprise.)

Not as surprised as she’ll be when I wipe her little mind come September and replace her with the 5. What James is tapping into, literally, is the opportunity for these little Roy Batty’s to have a final monologue before we retire them.

Splendid.

James was also kind enough to let me play with his Robot Flaneur while he was still building it. A constant stream of the easily recognisable unfamiliar – a delightful tour of the city during a weekend that I was a little more stranded at my desk than usual. Now it has nine cities to get lost in and if you have a second screen please take advantage of it while you work/play.

Maybe make sure your phone can see the screen too.

*My latest phone is named Greta. After a ship I named for a screenplay who was in turn named after Garbo. And the clearwing butterfly (if the thing ever gets made, you’ll see why).

One of the side effects of being BoingBoinged around the same time that Warren Ellis shines a light on your little slice of the Internet is that lots of people come to take a look and all attempt to squeeze their eyeballs through a narrow tube that then causes a server rupture that results in a spell of fall-overing for most websites. There are probably more technical terms for this but I prefer to call it ‘being fucked’. In a good way. It just means your website doesn’t walk right for a little while.

Well that used to be the case anyway. For a few years now I’ve had @loudmouthman looking after my website (this one and a few others I have squirreled away), ensuring my WordPress installations are up to date and generally answering all the annoying questions I have when Google fails me. He’s been doing this since an older version of my site got hacked and was properly done over. Since then things have run like clockwork. Or whatever the digital version of clockwork is.

I now recommend him to everyone I know if they’re even considering using WordPress. My backend now has an effective series of bells and whistles as well as a near invisible suite of addons that just keep the site up no matter what and most importantly don’t get in the way of my infrequent blogging attempts.

This of course is just a small part of what Nik does for a living (he recently helped Ridley Scott’s mob not get overwhelmed by Life in a Day) so if you’re doing anything for a sustained period online he’s certainly the man to talk to. I said this on Twitter this morning, but its worth repeating: Too many talk themselves up, deliver little. Nik gets it done. End of.

Oh and he also runs a neat little Moleskine blog which is one of those cool things that I wished I’d thought of doing first.

There’s just too much awesome going on here. First check out this photo:

That’s Brad Fidler, Leonard Kleinrock and Matt Novak.

Read up on Kleinrock if you need to and please take note of Boelter Hall 3420. Then click here.

Our heritage site is a restoration of the original 1969 ARPA lab that sent the first Internet message from 3420 Boelter Hall at UCLA.  It will be open to the public and feature key artifacts including the very first piece of the Internet infrastructure, namely the Interface Message Processor (IMP).  We use teaching tools from the 1960s such as slide projects and blackboards to tell the story of the Internet’s early history.

Chills. I’ve been following this since @3420BoelterHall popped up on Twitter. Right now they’ve only got 184 followers so I urge you to get in on the ground floor of something very important and offer all the support you can. In many ways this reminds me of the work done by Sue Black to save Bletchley Park and I’m hoping there’s some discussion around the importance of this kind of physical archive/museum on both sides of the Atlantic.

Looks like 3420 is way ahead of me:

I believe that most of you will know the fellow Brit in question and I’m looking forward to seeing him document the ongoing work as well as reflect on the history.

Matt Novak I’ve been following for quite a while via one of the best websites on the Internet: Paleofuture. We’ve yet to meet in person, but he’s also incessantly entertaining on Twitter so I do intend to buy him a drink at some point. It makes perfect sense that he was one of the first people to get access to the site and organised an Obscura Day tour.

The director of this endeavor is Mr Fidler. Brad and I first crossed paths on Seesmic when it was still a video platform I believe (he’ll correct me if I’m wrong) and once conned me out of a hotel at an ungodly hour to do shots in a dive bar with an ungodly mix of Internet hobo types in New York. He’s a force of nature and just the right chap to see this mission through.

If you have even a passing interest in Internet history then you’ll be excited to know that 3420 plans to be back to its original 1969 self this summer.  I can’t wait to go visit.

And I really got hot when I saw Janette Scott
fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills…

I’m a big fan of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1962) so was delighted to hear there was going to be a chance to see it on a big screen again:

On the first night of the UK Green Film Festival we’ll be showing Steve Sekely’s DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1962) at 10.30pm at Shortwave Cinema. Come along beforehand for a drink in the bar, where we’ll be displaying real carnivorous plants, and also a Triffid cake designed by Cakes & Crunk! Plus a Q&A with James DC who’ll be running a radio show on John Wyndham a few days later on Resonance FM.

Shortwave is a beautiful bar and cinema right on my doorstep that I write out of and have the occasional meeting at. The guys that run it really know their stuff and always seem to be supporting independent film events. This one is being organised by Passenger Films and is part of the UK Green Film Festival.

All good reasons to come along, but mostly this is about Howard Keel, that kid asking if the pilot is blind too and a LOT of slow moving flesh eating plants.

See you there.

Finally caught the first episode of Camelot last night and it seems a very worthy successor to The Tudors (I’m also being told to check out The Borgias, but that looks a tad popey for my tastes). I’m not sure we’ll see Sean Pertwee again, but he lasted a little longer than when he was playing King Henry’s uncle (“French bastards!”). Great scene that.

The Tudors was also directed by Ciaran Donnelly, a wonderful chap that I was lucky to spend a few weeks with a while back over in Ireland. We were locked in a series of rooms breaking the plot of another TV show and I hope that’s something we can back to at some point.

I learned a lot and it was fun to collaborate in that way. Looking forward to seeing how Camelot evolves as again it’s saddled with an overly familiar story, but already its interpretation of magic and the casting of Merlin serves the tale well.

Hopefully also seeing the first episode of Game of Thrones this evening so it’s all swords and beards for a while…

So here’s a thing.

A couple of months ago I got an email from a chap called Andrew Sykes. At that point we’d never met, but I’d loved his short film from last year and we’d swapped a couple of emails about it and became Twitter buddies. The usual. So Andrew had decided to enter the Sci Fi London Film Festival’s 48 hour movie thing and was curious to see if I was interested in getting involved. Normally I admit I’d probably have said no – the email arrived when I was up to my neck in writing and I’ve never entered anything like this and never had the inclination to. But I was also going through a phase where I was saying ‘yes’ to as many things as possible which I had never had a pop at before. Plus I knew from Haruka that Andrew was good people. And making a short film in a weekend sounds like a blast… right?

So a few weeks later we grab a coffee and I suggest we rope in a few other people. They also say yes. I mention the thing to Haruka too just on the off chance that she’s free and wants to star in whatever the hell we end up doing. The timing is horrible as she’s going to be out of the country filming 47 Ronin. ‘No worries’ I say, ‘We’ll find someone else and…’ At this point Haruka interrupts and says, ‘No’. She’ll swing it so she’s on a plane in time to make it back to us and then give us 24 hours before she has to jump on another plane back. I honestly tried to talk her out of this. No dice.

So it’s almost 5am. Haruka is in the air. Andrew is here. Neither of us can sleep. Steve, who is looking after our sound, is fast asleep somewhere below. I guess he’s the sensible one. The cat is looking at me and I’m wondering if we can coax him into the film. Next door my neighbour is crying. The fifth member of our team, Dave, is up north and will be working remotely – if we can put his particular skill set to use. It all starts in a few hours.

Here’s the deal.

We don’t know what we’re doing. Yet.

Around 10am we should be given three things:

A title, a line of dialogue and a prop.

Then I start writing. Maximum running time is five minutes. We have the weekend. The film has to be finished and up online Monday morning.

Easy, right?

Oh and we have a logo. One of the first things Andrew had to do was register our involvement and a name was required for the paperwork. From somewhere known only to him popped up a phrase which became the name which we are now filming under:

Pretty sweet…

Right now the only thing I know with any degree of certainty is that I want to write something for Haruka. She’s been so super about wanting to work on this and was such a trooper on the Slingers sizzle that I think its time I built something for her to get her teeth into. So that’s the only goal I’ll be starting the thing with.

Or to borrow from Jean-Luc Godard then…  All you need for a movie is a girl and a pen.

Maybe we can get a gun in there too.

We’ll see…

Last week I met up with an old friend who was kind enough to give me one of the limited edition prints of a poster that you probably saw rule the Internet a few weeks ago. 20 things that happened on the Internet in 2010 is a puzzle poster by McBess commissioned by Syzygy.

You can see it in all its glory here. And I think I’m correct in saying that no one has yet to name all twenty things correctly…

If you want to grab the Internet’s interest by the balls and in a good way then this is the way to do it. Can’t wait to see what these guys come up with next.

Oh and my friend, John, also wrote one of my favourite books – the hilarious Sea Otters Gambolling In The Wild, Wild Surf. I still think it’s one of the few books screaming out to be adapted into a movie and if you haven’t read it please do so as soon as possible. You’re in for a treat.